The Inheritance Book 1

Ch 60 Walls Closing In: Jarrett Jennings [Thursday Morning, Week Three]

Jarrett's mind drifted and rolled, swimming up from the depths of nothingness. Far off in the distance, voices.

"Jarrett! Dude! Wake your tall, skinny butt up! Jarrett?"

Someone jabbed and jiggled his chest. "Jarrett!"

He sat up, suddenly wide awake.

Maui was sitting next to him on the gritty floor. He clapped him on the shoulder. "Welcome back!"

Coach was there too, looking like he'd taken a tumble down the cliffs. Bumps on his head, bruises and gashes on his arms. He was cutting strands of spider web off of Graehm.

"You're all alive!!" Jarrett grabbed Maui into a side-hug. "Fuck! I'm alive! We're all alive!"

"For now." Maui side-hugged him back. "But it feels like we're already in hell. No offense to any of you. I mean, just look where we are."

Jarrett took in their surroundings. They were still underground in the caves, but now imprisoned in a small one about the size of his bedroom at the castle.

A sort of bench seemed to be carved out of stone along one wall. Another glowing crystal filled the tomb with light.

"How did we all end up here?" he asked. "I got knocked out or something when Bigfoot breathed on me."

"Bigfoot?" Maui's jaw dropped. "Are you serious?"

"Oh yes," Graehm confirmed. "It was Bigfoot, for lack of a better term. And he had an enormous dog."

"That monster!" A shudder traveled through Jarrett's body. "But again, how did we all get here?"

Graehm pulled a thick piece of sticky spider web from his hair and shook it off his hand. "I was pushed into a cave hole that turned out to be something like a natural tube slide."

"Us too." Coach moved aside and thumbed to an opening behind him. "That's the one Sione and I came through. We were here for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, then you and Graehm popped out of that one."

Next to Graehm was a perfectly round cutout in the wall.

Maui said, "There's another opening over there, but like the others, it's a slippery slide and there's no climbing out of it."

A slide? What the hell was going on? Jarrett struggled to process it all. A familiar restlessness seized his muscles. He couldn't sit any longer. He got to his feet and began to pace back and forth. Hunger gnawed at his stomach, but he barely noticed because of the panic setting in.

"So we just survived Bigfoot only to be buried alive in here?" Jarrett managed to cough out through increasingly shallow breaths. The walls felt like they were closing in.

For the first time since arriving at Trecorin, he regretted coming here. Suddenly the rejection, chaos and dysfunction of home didn't seem so bad.

Graehm shrugged away the last thick threads that bound him, and waved his hands at Jarrett. "Hang on. Before you hyperventilate, listen. I believe there's a hidden passageway out of here. I just need to find the knob or lever or button or trigger. Either that, or we wait for whoever is responsible to let us out."

"So you think there's hope! That we might not die down here?" Maui's face brightened.

"Yes. If you take everything into consideration," Graehm said as he closely scrutinized one section of the wall. "This room appears to be part of an established procedure for dealing with trespassers, since all chutes end up here. I do not believe an automatic death sentence is part of that procedure. Do you see any skeletons here?"